The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

November 5, 2003

FILM REVIEW; The Game Concludes With Light And Noise

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 5, 2003

''Everything that has a beginning has an end.'' This sentence appears on the front page of the production notes handed out at press screenings of ''The Matrix Revolutions,'' which opens worldwide today. It is also uttered by the Oracle (Mary Alice) in response to a question from Neo (Keanu Reeves). ''Where is this going?'' he wants to know. ''Where will it end?'' Neo may be the One, but he can hardly be the only One posing such questions. The talk of endings in this, the third and ostensibly final movie in the series, is so insistent that you may wonder whether the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed it, felt the need to reassure the audience, and perhaps themselves, that it was really, finally over. There are still a few loose ends that might be spun into future sequels -- ''The Matrix Recycled,'' perhaps, or ''The Matrix Recall Election'' or ''The Matrix Recipe Book and Holiday Menu Planner'' (featuring the Oracle's baking tips) -- but the saga of Neo, which began in 1999 when he was a scruffy hacker who took a red pill, has now by all appearances reached its terminus. The appropriate response is somewhere between ''About time'' (about six hours, depending on what's added for the DVD release) and ''So what?''

Still it would be unfair to the Wachowskis, special-effects virtuosos that they are, to say that their trilogy ends with a whimper. There is plenty of bright light and big noise in ''Revolutions'' -- a ferocious machine assault on battered Zion, a rain-swept showdown between Neo and his nemesis Smith (Hugo Weaving), a giant talking Wizard of Oz head. Some major characters meet gruesome deaths, while others endure heroically. But all this bombast, which may raise an honest goose bump or two, cannot dispel the overall atmosphere of exhaustion.

The first ''Matrix'' succeeded by entwining traditional -- and often breathtakingly innovative -- action-movie motifs with the mapping of an intricate and mysterious world. The Wachowskis were pioneers in bringing some of the exploratory fascination of advanced video games into the movies, and ''The Matrix'' was so absorbing because the viewer's initial disorientation and gradual enlightenment followed Neo's own initiation into the film's vividly imagined layers of reality and meaning. All of which have, perhaps inevitably, flattened out.

Once the game environment has been surveyed, there is nothing to do but play, which is never as enthralling, especially when the keyboard or the joystick is in someone else's hands. ''The Matrix Reloaded,'' which has become the highest-grossing movie of 2003 in spite of widespread disappointment among critics and fans alike, tried to extend the first film's elegant mixing of action and exposition, only to bog down hopelessly in portentousness and obfuscation.

''Reloaded'' was certainly a lumpy, gaseous treatise of a movie, but viewers of ''Revolutions'' may find themselves looking back on it fondly. It was at least overstuffed with potentially interesting new characters, plot lines and make-believe metaphysical conundrums. In contrast ''Revolutions,'' which has a roughly equivalent running time, feels padded. The battle for Zion goes on forever and seems designed to justify the picture's enormous military hardware budget. There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of ''Reloaded'' have been abandoned.

Persephone and the Merovingian, the sinister computer-program power couple played by Monica Bellucci and Lambert Wilson, return only briefly, forcing countless budding Matrix scholars to toss out whole chapters of their dissertations and cheating those of us who counted on a little more old-style movie star voluptuousness to warm up the virtual chill.

Mr. Reeves, perhaps worried that he was showing too much range, has purged himself of all expression apart from a worried frown and a sorrowful grimace. The salient distinction of the human remnant in Zion, apart from their earth-tone natural-fiber fashions, has been the capacity for love, a word much spoken in this movie. But their ranks, in spite of the presence of fine actors like Laurence Fishburne, Harry Lennix and Harold Perrineau, become more robotic with every passing scene. The sole exception is Jada Pinkett Smith as the daredevil pilot Niobe, who brings a touch of bad-girl B-movie attitude into the humorless subterranean gloom.

The major disclosure of ''Revolutions'' is that the boundaries that had previously separated the real world from the Matrix, and the humans from the programs, have proven to be porous. Smith has jumped out of the Matrix, and Neo is able to export his special powers from that realm into the machine-controlled physical domain. It turns out that there is train service connecting the various worlds, though its only customers are two Indian computer programs who have apparently given birth to a human child, a lovely little girl named Sati. All of this may be puzzling -- I was puzzled, anyway -- but scenes like the one in which Neo meets Sati and her parents have a quiet, beguiling strangeness reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick.

Written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers; director of photography, Bill Pope; edited by Zach Staenberg; music by Don Davis; production designer, Owen Paterson; visual effects supervisor, John Gaeta; produced by Joel Silver; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 129 minutes. This film is rated R.